Symphony No. 2, “The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved”

By Julius Eastman

BORN : October 27, 1940, in New York City

DIED: May 28, 1990, in Buffalo, NY

Ω COMPOSED : 1983

Ω WORLD PREMIERE: November 20, 2018, with Luciano Chessa leading the Mannes Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall in New York City

Ω CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PREMIERE: This weekend’s performances mark the first presentations of Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. 2 by The Cleveland Orchestra.

Ω ORCHESTRATION: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 english horns, 3 bass clarinets, 3 contrabass clarinets, 3 bassoons, 3 contrabassoons, 2 trombones, bass trombone, 3 tubas, 4 timpani, and strings

Ω DURATION: about 15 minutes

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that you find the handwritten score of a symphony in the bottom of a trunk that belonged to a famous composer’s former lover. But when composer, scholar, and performer Mary Jane Leach was able to confirm that the Second Symphony was, indeed, a composition by Julius Eastman, she got to work. A contemporary of his who had worked with Eastman in the 1980s, Leach had spent years collecting scores and audio, and trying to record his music for the public to finally hear. She understood what the musical world is finally beginning to embrace: Julius Eastman was, in his prime, a brilliant and deeply affective composer, a man light-years ahead of his time. But Julius Eastman — like Mozart, Bach, and other composers the public now heralds as geniuses —  had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death. Only eight months after he died did a notice appear in any newspaper or media outlet.

Born in New York City and raised in Ithaca, New York, Eastman was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia before joining a vibrant new-music scene at SUNY Buffalo under the helm of composer and conductor Lukas Foss. There, he began composing experimental works such as Thruway (1970) and Macle (1971), often turning to pop music and jazz for harmonic language and melodic styles. Early on, his works demonstrated a capacity to shock, awe, and thrill. In

Macle, for example, vocalists faithfully chant “take heart” (the mantra of the work) even over the sounds of occasional screams and electronic buzzing. In Eastman’s sprawling, joyous, 70-minute work, Femenine (1974) — which premiered before Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts—  sleigh bells chime, marimbas shimmer, and pianos arpeggiate glorious, golden chords as bright as a sunrise.

Eastman defied the world of experimental music in the 1970s from the beginning. He was a Minimalist composer before we came to associate that genre of music with straight white men such as Reich, Glass, and Terry Riley. He experimented with avant-garde techniques and mixing genres 15 years before composers in New York and elsewhere took on similar work under the maxim of Post-Minimalism.

If Julius Eastman was musically progressive, his identity as an unapologetically out Black gay man was equally radical in some circles in the 1970s. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” Eastman remarked in a 1976 interview. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” It may appear to some that each of those categories exists independently of the others, but to Eastman, they were all necessary components of his identity that could not be separated — nor did he wish for them to be.

The 1969 Stonewall rebellion was still fresh in people’s minds when Eastman came into his own as a composer. So was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Both of those events were important markers that highlighted and suppressed Eastman’s experiences. New York’s queer cultural scene was predominantly white — and occasionally hostile to Black men like him. Leaders of the Black Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s often expressed ambivalence about their queer brethren.

For Eastman, however, both components of his identity were necessary to his life and musical works — as explicit, confrontive, and provocative titles such as Nigger Faggot (1978) attest. He wished to accost the listener with the social categories that he experienced as a Black gay man — categories that he was also proud of, even as others sought to condemn him for them. For these reasons, musicologist Ellie Hisama writes, we must understand Eastman’s work “as a black, gay man who worked in a primarily white new music scene… with respect to both of these social categories, rather than to disregard them within a ‘post-race or sexuality-neutral context.’”

Unfortunately, by the 1980s, Eastman’s life had begun to fall apart. Unable to secure a permanent faculty appointment and on bad terms with his family after his grandmother died, he became difficult to locate, residing either outdoors or in homeless shelters or most likely both. He was evicted from apartments, drifted in and out of family homes, and became a fixture at Tompkins Square Park in New York City. Suffering from mental illness and drug addiction, he died in a Buffalo hospital in 1990 from cardiac arrest at the age of 49.

Eastman’s Second Symphony (1983), a dedication to his former lover and a chronicle of their failed relationship, is an example of the musical bravery and deep affect that Eastman is known for expressing. It is a large, challenging work for any orchestra to wrestle with. Requiring 100 musicians for a piece of music that can take anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes to perform, the original score boasts three bassoons, three double-bass (or contra) bassoons, three bass clarinets, six timpani (this weekend’s performances reduce it to four), three double-bass (or contrabass) clarinets, and three tubas, among other features. The more difficult challenge for the ensemble, however, is to figure out how to wrangle everyone together to perform a work that offers opportunities for asynchronous and improvisatory music-making while ensuring that they also perform together in time at the right moments for certain musical phrases or cadences.

The symphony begins with proclamations of love but ends in failure. As the conductor, musicologist, and editor of Eastman’s score Luciano Chessa stated in an interview, “[The] symphony ends with a lot of loose ends, it was all by design. So I was not going to put in a final cadence or something! The piece is finished, as what it was supposed to be.” The strings begin in unison, quickly swelling the orchestra, bringing in the brass and timpani to dramatic effect. The symphony itself is a mix of droning with articulated musical phrases that prod at the ear, encouraging mourning, building up slowly in thickness and richness in its orchestration. It reaches an intense, dramatic apex roughly two-thirds into the work, where the strings, brass, and percussion wail out their grief. The ending, however, is mute and subdued, with the woodwinds gloomily and moodily thrumming out the last few notes.

In Eastman’s inscription of the work, he writes, “On Tuesday, Main and Chestnut at 19 o’clock, The Faithful Friend and his Beloved Friend decided to meet. On Monday the day before, Christ came, just as it was foretold. Some went up on the right, and some went down on the left. Trumpets did sound (a little sharp), and electric violins did play (a little flat). A most terrible sound. And in the twinkling of an eye the Earth vanished and was no more. But on Tuesday, the day after on Main and Chestnut at 19 o’clock, there stood the Lover Friend and his Beloved Friend, just as they had planned, embracing one another.”

The ending of the symphony portrays just that: two former lovers, standing in darkness, grieving from heartbreak, unsure of what, exactly, comes next.

— Kira Thurman

Kira Thurman is Associate Professor of History, Germanic Studies, and Musicology at the University of Michigan, a founder of blackcentraleurope.com, and author of the award-winning book Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms